Recorded presentation3B.4
Terrestrial observation of vegetation health as a tool to monitor global socioeconomic activities
Felix Kogan, NOAA/NESDIS, Camp Springs, MD; and W. Guo
Over the past three decades, observations of the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on NOAA operational polar-orbiting environmental satellites have successfully served the global community to monitor and predict ocean, atmosphere and land. AVHRR data and products contributed to the Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) serving such socioeconomic activities as monitoring water resource, detecting environmental hazards, assessing weather impacts on agriculture and forestry, transportation, air quality, spreading diseases and insects and other. This information provided useful advises to the public, farmers and ranchers, commodity groups, agribusiness, insurance providers, extension agents, water managers, decision and policy makers in the governments and international organizations. With nearly 30 years of the accumulated AVHRR data, the area of their applications expanded in the/ direction of agricultural production modeling, understanding of climate change, and land use land cover changes, resource management, and early and more efficient monitoring of the environmental impacts on economy and society. This becomes possible due to the development of Vegetation Health indices (VHI). This presentation describes how the new operational space technology helps monitoring vegetation condition and health, detecting vegetation stress, providing an early drought warning, evaluating weather-affected area, predicting crop and rangeland production, identifying the areas of mosquitoes habitats and intensity of their activities what contributes to malaria and vector-borne epidemics. New method and indices were developed from 27-year AVHRR-based radiances, which is a new data set of 4-km spatial and 7-day composit temporal resolution covering the entire terrestrial Earth. These unique data is the only available longest global set with the highest spatial and temporal resolution. It was developed by applying the most recent advances in data calibration and processing. A very important advantage of the VHI is their ability to monitor a combination of vegetation greenness with canopy temperature and also evaluate cumulative impacts of weather. Some of the most recent achievements in drought monitoring show that drought can be detected one-two months earlier than from any other observations. Drought detection and advanced warnings help relief organizations to provide food to drought-stricken areas when the population is in great need. The VHI correlates highly with productivity of crops and pastures and can be used as numerical indicator of drought-related agricultural losses in much advance of harvest. The recent studies indicate that the VHI provides lead-time information about potential for development of mosquito-borne epidemics, insects and crop diseases. The antecedent and physiological effects discernable from the new method can be used for diagnosis of a tendency toward deterioration of vegetation health and potential for vegetation stress development three months before the drought started. This provides added warning lead time, which is critically important for pinpointing the problem, making decisions and implementing measures to mitigate drought consequences. These measures are important steps for sustainability of the developing nations.
Session 3B, International Applications Part II (Continued)
Monday, 21 January 2008, 4:00 PM-5:30 PM, 207
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